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  • Eatin’ Good? Not in This Neighborhood: A Legal Analysis of Disparities in Food Availability and Quality at Chain Supermarkets in Poverty-Stricken Areas

    Many Americans-especially the poor-face severe hurdles in their attempts to secure the most basic of human needs-food. One reason for this struggle is the tendency of chain supermarkets to provide a limited selection of goods and a lower quality of goods to patrons in less affluent neighborhoods. Healthier items such as soy milks, fresh fish, and lean meats are not present in these stores, and the produce that is present is typically well past the peak of freshness. Yet, if the same patron were to go to another supermarket owned by the same chain--but located in a wealthier neighborhood-she would find a wide selection of healthy foods and fresh produce. What are the poor people who live in the inner cities--who are disproportionately African American and Latino-to do? How can they obtain healthy food against these odds? This Article argues that the actions of the supermarkets are unconscionable, and therefore proposes a federal law that will prevent chain grocery stores from engaging in such practices. The Article first examines the scope of the problem created by these supermarket practices. The Article then explains why current laws are inadequate to address this issue. Finally, the Article proposes that Congress use its authority under the Commerce Clause to enact legislation that would require supermarket chains to carry the same selection and quality of goods at all stores in the same chain.

  • Time to Step Up: Modeling the African American Ethnivestor for Self-Help Entrepreneurship in Urban America

    When the United States Congress passed legislation in late 2000 to revitalize the urban core with incentives for equity investors, African Americans were inconspicuously absent as stakeholders in the enterprise. Subsidies in the form of tax credits were instead gobbled up by investor groups who developed upscale hotel-convention centers, high priced condominiums, and symphony orchestra venues that the pre-existing poor residents could not afford. The focus of this Article is not to blame those investors who took advantage of the opportunity, though they perverted the purpose of the subsidy. Rather, this Article seeks to identify a new substrata of the African American middle class who can step up to seize the opportunity for the benefit of the low income residents in the low income communities as the law was designed.

  • Constitutional Cash: Are Banks Guilty of Racial Profiling in Implementing the United States Patriot Act?

    This Article begins by comparing the concerns of American racial profiling to current terrorism concerns. Part II is an overview of the Bank Secrecy Act and its role in privacy issues concerning bank customers (as the predecessor to the USA Patriot Act). Here, the value of traditional reporting devices, specifically CTRs and SARs used by banks to alert law enforcement to possible terrorist activities, are discussed and evaluated. The facts suggest these reports have been ineffective in identifying terrorists, and have not only greatly infringed upon First Amendment privacy rights, but also diminished the Fourth Amendment protection against warrant-less searches of American bank account holders. Although the Supreme Court has previously ruled on the Constitutionality of these issues, I suggest that they must now reexamine a decision which many always felt was illogical, but has become increasingly so in today's fear-driven environment. Part III explores the policies banks initiated to comply with Patriot Act I, and the possibility that those policies have contributed, to the racial profiling of certain individuals of, or mistaken for, being of Middle Eastern descent. Part IV is an analysis of some of the problems Patriot Act I created. Part V highlights the dangers of The Proposed Domestic Security Enhancement Act, also known as Patriot Act I. Part VI discusses the desperate need to pass the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA) and evaluates whether the changes in bank policy attributed to Patriot Act I and proposed Patriot Act II are essential to the government's ability to strengthen national security and root out terrorists in our midst, even though they compromise the financial privacy Americans expect and believe in. Finally, the Conclusion proposes several solutions to protect American Constitutional liberties, obtain the intelligence necessary to protect us from terrorism, while most importantly beginning the process of repairing the psyche of America.

  • Dislocated and Deprived: A Normative Evaluation of Southeast Asian Criminal Responsibility and the Implications of Societal Fault

    This Note argues that certain Southeast Asian defendants should be able to use their families' refugee experience as well as their own economic and social marginalization in the U.S. as a partial excuse for their criminal acts. This argument draws its strength from both the socioeconomic deprivation of much of the Southeast Asian community and the linking of this reality to a careful analysis of the moral foundations of the criminal law. In essence, the American criminal justice system, which draws much of its moral force to punish from the theory of retributivism, cannot morally justify the full punishment of a large portion of the Southeast Asian community. It is precluded from doing so by American society's contribution, in one form or another, to many of these defendants' criminal conduct.

  • African American Intimacy: The Racial Gap in Marriage

    This essay is divided into three parts. Part I documents the extent of the racial gap in marriage. Part II uses the marriage patterns of affluent Black men in particular to speculate about how the relationships of Black men and women might be influenced by the relative numbers of men and women and the men's socioeconomic characteristics in ways that depress marriage rates. Part III connects the low rate of marriage among African Americans to the differing interracial marriage rates of Black men and women.

  • “We Insist! Freedom Now”: Does Contract Doctrine Have Anything Consitutional to Say?

    This Article first exposes the detachment between contract doctrine and the scattered antidiscrimination norms and analyzes the harmful consequences of this detachment. It then creates an original meeting point between the two bodies of law, one of which is intentionally located within contract doctrine. This point is found by dismantling the dominant concept of "freedom OF contact", and especially by defining and establishing the freedom to make a contract.

  • Can Money Whiten? Exploring Race Practice in Colonial Venezuela and Its Implications for Contemporary Race Discourse

    The Gracias al Sacar, a fascinating and seemingly inconceivable practice in eighteenth century colonial Venezuela, allowed certain individuals of mixed Black and White ancestry to purchase "Whiteness" from their King. The author exposes the irony of this system, developed in a society obsessed with "natural" ordering that labeled individuals according to their precise racial ancestry. While recognizing that the Gracias al Sacar provided opportunities for advancement and an avenue for material and social struggle, the author argues that it also justified the persistence of racial hierarchy. The Article concludes that the Gracias al Sacar, along with their present-day implications, undermine an essentialist view of race, revealing the negotiability of race status and its dependence on social and material norms